Studies have shown that birds have emotional structures much like man and the higher animals. Anyone who has lived with a bird or had a bird for a pet can attest to this. A bird in a bad mood will peck at the owner for example, when hours earlier it would be rubbing up against the owner and taking food from him. When a bird's mate disappears, the remaining bird is visibly despondent and nervous for a period of days or even weeks much as a human would be.
Even though birds are not too bright, they nonetheless need mental stimulation, or at least seek it. In a parakeet cage, there is very little in the way of resource material for avian mental stimulation. The bird bores quickly with reading the newspaper lining the bottom of the cage unless it is one he has not yet read. In the wild the bird has plenty of excitement and entertainment, much of it being "Camino Real" in form in which the bird is flying for its life. Nonetheless, it is exciting and mentally stimulating, provided the bird does not wind up as meal for a cat.
Obviously parakeets cannot duplicate the wild freedom of the outdoors inside a parakeet cage. There are few projects to be done in a cage, and even fewer that interest the parakeet. Aside from the wood shavings, a little bird seed scattered about and a water feeding tray there is nothing for the parakeet to amuse itself with other than its chirping. It hasn't even thumbs to twiddle.
There are toys available for birds, but generally speaking they are not particularly well received by the bird inasmuch as they were conceived more by humans who fail to truely understand the bird brain. The bird will not like the blue rubber mouse that its owner thinks is se cute.
Thus faced with the communication gap between bird and owner, and the inability of the bird to provide mental stimulation for itself, the bird is doomed to spend its life with an increasingly dwindling mental capacity which, at its peak capacity, was still only a bird brain.
There is a crying need therefore, for projects which can be entertaining and stimulating to a being that has no hands or arms and cannot speak or comprehend the spoken word, a challenge to amuse what for present purposes amounts to little more than a walking beak.